Description/Abstract: Color in the Classroom reveals how activist anthropologists including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead dramatically changed how American schools taught race. Anthropologists created lesson plans, lectures, courses, and pamphlets designed to revise what they called "the 'race' concept" in American education. They believed that if teachers presented race in scientific and egalitarian terms, conveying human diversity as learned habits of culture rather than innate characteristics, American citizens would become less racist. Drawing on hundreds of first-hand accounts written by teachers nationwide, Zoe Burkholder traces the influence of this anthropological activism on the way that teachers understood, spoke, and taught about race.

Zoe Burkholder, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University. Burkholder has been a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University and a Spencer Dissertation Fellow.

This book talk is sponsored by the Program in History and Education in the Department of Arts and Humanities and Gottesman Libraries. It is part of A&H H4070, History of Education in the U.S., but is open to all members of the TC community.

Persons interested in attending may rsvp by Friday, 2/24.

Where: 305 Russell